Rippleshttp://ripplesblog.org
Small Droplets. Big Waves.Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:28:30 +0000en-UShourly1The Best of Making Ripples Columnshttp://ripplesblog.org/the-best-of-making-ripples-columns/
http://ripplesblog.org/the-best-of-making-ripples-columns/#commentsMon, 20 Jul 2015 22:50:16 +0000http://ripplesblog.org/?p=3638As we prepare to upload new resources, here’s a look back at some of our favorite columns:

Spring is Here: A Celebration of Local Babies, from Mammals to Amphibians

Turtle in our backyard, peeking out at me.

Is there a topic we haven’t covered yet that would help you make a difference or create a more justice-driven, sustainable world? Let us know and we’ll research it! Email MakeSomeRipples@Gmail.com with your topic suggestion. Scheduled topics include DIY squirrel feeders, green cemeteries, beneficial invasive species, traveling goats that eat your yard enemies, and recipes for the All American Sun Oven!

Hi everyone! Sorry we haven’t posted an update for awhile. We’ve both been busy acquiring skills (photography, naturalist studies, technology, business, art) to help us bring Ripples to life on the ground. Speaking of ground, we may not have land or an earthbag house yet, but we’re not giving up! As you may have noticed, we’ve been at this lifestyle transition for years and have no intention of quitting.

In order to dedicate our lives to doing Ripples work, it’s helpful to have many different sources of income and to be able to work from home as much as possible. Working onsite at our future earthbag house will let us tend to the land and home as needed, limit our emissions from commuting, and allow us to welcome visitors for occasional tours. Since much of what Ripples “is” will continue to be online (the educational center), the website maintenance will require having a home office to upload new DIY videos, posts, photos, and more. This is a long transition and takes a lot of planning, but so far it’s going well!

We not only think about “the money” but also “the method” – how are we earning it and what are the effects of those endeavors?

From Amanda:

“A Cupful of Bunnies” Pencil and ink. 2015 Now available with matching envelope sticker seal!

My greeting card business began last October, as a way to raise money for Ripples through my art. Printed on sustainably sourced paper, I’m now working on a wildlife conservation educational card line. In just four months, we sold 456 cards accounting for $856 in sales for a total profit of $182 towards Ripples, after our initial investment of $673 on the first printings of cards. This is only the beginning, and because of our stock, we hope 2015 will raise a lot more money for Ripples. Ripples cards are available online through me, or for sale in Fayetteville at Ozark Natural Foods, Nightbird Books, Himalayan Mountain Shop, Center St. Mercantile, or the Curious Bookshoppe on Block – all of these partnerships were set up in these first months, and our educational center will (someday) house resources for how to approach businesses. We’re sharing this because seeing the process and not just the end result may prove useful to you if you want to work from home as an artist or craftsperson and focus your time on making a difference in an area you care about. So when I learn something, I try to make it available for others’ benefit. Now that I have experience doing this, I’d like to create a guide on seeking out and attending craft shows and holiday festivals, or selling at your local Farmer’s Market, to help people who are just starting out on their green job journeys.

Besides art, my writing through the Making Ripples column is a dream come true job for me, with over 125 columns written to date. The archive for these columns is free to access and includes information on natural building, ethical eating, DIY ideas for crafts, gardening, recycling, water conservation, and a lot more. I hope you find them useful and I’m thrilled to be able to do this to help people transition to a sustainable, justice-filled lifestyle that hopefully brings them joy and health.

Red-shouldered Hawk in our backyard 2014.

Most of the fall semester (2014) was spent learning digital photography. I used part of my scholarship from my service in AmeriCorps*VISTA (celebrating their 50th Anniversary this February 25th!) to take a great class at Northwest Arkansas Community College. Why? Because an online educational center absolutely needs good photos, video, and digital media to illustrate our message. With these skills, I can more capably show you the habitat we’ll be revitalizing, post pictures of those baby animals emerging in the spring, post videos of our earthbag house being built, etc. My apologies for not updating Ripples blog recently – I had my focus on the camera.

From Ryan:

I spend a lot more time behind the scenes, slowly mastering the tools that will enable us to pull off the lofty, but we hope doable, goals Amanda described above. Our “backend” areas of focus currently include:

Planning a wholesale website upgrade, which will involve a new look/experience, an online store for selling Amanda’s greeting cards and other artwork she may choose to market, and a format more capable of presenting the Educational Center (or “Making a Difference Demonstration site;” we’re still playing with what to call it).

Crafting a budget that hopefully will grant us comprehensive insight into this project, whose complexity and extensiveness has so thoroughly humbled, and excited, us.

Finding Land! What a journey this has been so far. Good land near good people situated in a critical conservation area where we fit in is (probably not surprisingly) difficult to track down. But we shall persevere! We don’t have much in the way of financial resources, but hopefully things will start falling into place once the inevitable cascade of craziness (find, survey, frequently visit land; accumulate stuff to put on it; bring people out to help build; source materials; etc.) picks up in earnest.

Besides those things, I work with local non-profits to help them stabilize and strengthen their web presence, and spend my working days at Ozark Natural Foods being the best Network Admin I know how to be (a journey offering daily opportunities and insights). I’m also highly intrigued by the photography training Amanda has had, and will no doubt lend a hand with the actual taking of photos, though I already do much of the computer-oriented photographic work.

Thanks for reading and following our journey!

]]>http://ripplesblog.org/love-from-ripples/feed/0Ripples Greeting Cards Now Available!http://ripplesblog.org/ripples-greeting-cards-now-available/
http://ripplesblog.org/ripples-greeting-cards-now-available/#commentsTue, 30 Sep 2014 17:20:39 +0000http://ripplesblog.org/?p=3525Update: Ripples’ Halloween, Thanksgiving, and other greeting cards are now available locally at Ozark Natural Foods, Himalayan Mountain Shop, and the Curious Book Shoppe on Block St. They’re $4/card unless you buy directly from Amanda, $3/card or a pack of variety or single design (your choice) $13/5 cards.

Please support our work and share with friends!

To raise money for Ripples, we are now selling greeting cards! There are many ways to purchase a card or a pack of cards. You could buy them directly from Amanda through our Facebook page, or by calling us at (931) 532-0639 or through email: AmandaBancroft (at) Gmail (dot) com. Or you can buy them locally at various locations to be announced. View the designs you’d like, select your order, and arrange a delivery or meeting place to receive your cards and pay with cash or check. She can meet you in downtown Fayetteville, the library, or the farmer’s market and other locations. Amanda can also mail them to you if you’re not in Fayetteville (packs of cards only, please).

Price is $4 / card or $3 / card in a pack of 5 cards (variety packs are totally do-able, with multiple designs per pack!) Shipping is $5 within the contiguous 48 states.

We’re still looking for land to build our earthbag home in the Ozarks, and planning the house and educational center to be off-grid according to our definitions. Know of land for sale? Please tell us in the comments or email MakeSomeRipples@Gmail.com! We’ve been vetting locations in the past couple of months and haven’t found anything that feels right yet. But we’re not giving up!

Instead, we’ve been focusing on skill acquisition. Ryan has gotten great at repairing things around the house, something he inherited from his dad. He just fixed the door to my art studio, which works perfectly now. I’m getting better with a hammer, too! Wait you didn’t know I had an art studio? Yep! I have been happily producing greeting cards which will be for sale online and locally at Ozark Natural Foods, Himalayan Mountain Shop and other vendors. Check our Ripples Facebook page to see the new designs when they’re released for sale! Here’s a sneak peak at a drawing from last spring when it was “a work in progress” –

This semester, I’m studying digital photography in a class at Northwest Arkansas Community College so I can get familiar with my Nikon DSLR DS7100 camera and learn how to capture what we’re doing for Ripples educational center. Eventually, we’ll be documenting native species on our land and any workshops we do, using video and other media to convey the information. For now, I’m learning where the buttons are located…

“Being a naturalist is like being Edge Habitat, a conglomeration of science, art, spirituality, philosophy, and love, never just one place but stepping into many at once.” (from my first naturalist blog post)

Ripples touches upon several topics, from sustainable living to social justice and making a difference. We mostly focus on how Ryan & I (Amanda) are changing our lifestyle as completely as possible using the Ripples method, trying to make intentional choices that improve our health and the planet as a whole. Recently, we’ve been posting about nature because I just graduated from the Northwest Arkansas Master Naturalist program in the spring. It’s important for us to know as much as we can about native plants and animals because we live alongside them and wish to protect native habitat. Some of you have been following my naturalist summer blog series on water, mammals, birds, insects and fish. Apologies for only completing 5 of the 10 promised posts thus far; perhaps time and motivation will encourage me to finish them. But I think even posting them next summer would be cool – Ripples educational center is going to take a long time in development, and there will be plenty more opportunities to post on topics like these. Even better will be a more organized system of finding information, so you can see all our references to birds rather than just one post during one summer.

You can read it and the previous 99 columns in our archives. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to be able to write over 100 columns in my career. I’m not sure how to describe the experience, actually. Being a columnist is an underrated position of power and potential to change the world for the better. It’s a bit like downplaying the significance of daily jogging until one realizes that they have avoided terrible health conditions that could have befallen them had they remained sedentary. Those little chunks of 500 words keep me writing and thinking. Not only that, they get others thinking, too – and being able to get hundreds of people thinking about making ripples in the world is quite awesome. For that, I’m very grateful.

Bluebirds of happiness, migrating Canadian geese, the ugly duckling, mythology surrounding the phoenix…it’s no surprise that our avian friends play a central role in many cultures and mark the seasons of our lives. Flying dreams take me above the treetops to rescue people like superman or evade predators with the carefree ease of a bubble floating into the air on a summer’s day. Even as an adult, my imagination tempts me to consider every knee-high rock a launching pad for a springy step into the air. On road trips I pretend that the highway is a combination ice rink and air field, allowing my mind to envision elegant dances in mid-air around the telephone poles, feet just barely tickling the tall roadside grass and wildflowers that our birds and other wildlife depend on for food.

There are many great websites that make an interest in birds even more fun…

“What happens when a jazz composer challenges a vocal virtuoso to match the voices of some of her favorite birds? Serious fun! Join Grammy-recognized artists Maria Schneider and Theo Bleckmann in their musical experiment to help us tune in to nature’s music—from the melodious to the downright weird. You’ll never think of a sparrow or a toilet plunger in the same way again.” Visit Birds Got Swing: A Musical Experiment

“Train your brain to recognize over 50 bird songs with the Bird Song Hero matching game. Listen closely to featured songs and match each with the correct spectrogram visualization. You’ll be harnessing the power of the visual brain to help you identify the unique qualities of each song and commit sound patterns to memory.”

Learn about the features of a great birdhouse, pick the right box for the right species of bird, and learn how to install a nest box camera (ooooh!) at NestWatch.

Bird Trivia

(Answers Below)

What’s the difference between precocial and altricial chicks?

True or false: Great Blue Herons can seriously injure a human being.

True or false: Hummingbirds can be as big as your hand.

Birds are amniotes. What does this mean?

When do two Bald Eagles lock their talons in a free-fall?

Organizations for the Birds

Lend a Wing: Helping Birds

There are almost as many ways to help birds as there are flying fantasies. Pick from a myriad of options like the Great Backyard Bird Count, or eBird Counts year-round, and boost the end of your summer into the beginning of lifelong friendships with the feathered variety of sacred beings:

Build a variety of bird houses or nest boxes for songbirds, doves, and owls.

Create a backyard full of seasonal food sources for wildlife and birds.

Put window decals on any windows that may confuse birds into colliding with them.

Keep house cats indoors to prevent songbird killings. Cat predation is a major reason for songbird decline (2014). I have pet cats and love them, but my emotional love for cats is no reason to ignore the science involving cat numbers and bird numbers. My love would be better spent increasing the cats’ indoor quality of life than denying science exists. And no, just because cats are predators does not make them natural local predators or make their excess predation sustainable for ecosystems. Habitat loss and predation from other animals does kill birds, too, but it doesn’t cancel out cat-on-bird predation. “It was sort of like arguing that because there are wars going on out there, my little murders shouldn’t count.” -Richard Conniff, author. Fact Sheet on cats and wildlife.

Answers to Trivia Questions

Precocial means that chicks are hatched in an advanced state and able to feed themselves almost immediately, Altricial chicks require longer care from their parents because they hatch in a less developed state; True; True; Amniotes are organisms who reproduce with eggs that contain amniotic fluid and are adapted to lay eggs on land instead of in water; Bald Eagles lock talons in a free-fall during courtship.

Fish freak me out. The bulging eyes, that fishy smell, the scales and slime…and fortunately for the fish, I think they taste terrible! One of my biggest fears in life is deep water where large fish dwell, waiting to chomp on things which move (like my kicking legs) while they glide through a murky abyss. And yet, water without fish would be like trees without birds. I could spend hours (and have soaked up many a moment of free time) watching fish of all sizes. Their swimming movements are hypnotizing and meditative, reminding me a little of the arm movements of hula dancers in Hawaii. I wonder if the fish are telling their own oral tradition through their fishy dances, just like Hawaiian hula?

Overfishing depletes stocks of fish beyond their ability to recover. This disrupts the ecosystem and eliminates a valuable source of food and income.

Predator loss releases prey populations from both the pressure and risk of predation. Their removal can cause a potentially irreversible cascade of complex knock-on effects, destabilising marine ecosystems to their – and our – severe detriment.

Climate change is warming the oceans and making them more acidic. This will create vast dead zones as plankton and corals – the primary producers for nearly all marine life – struggle to survive under increasingly inhospitable conditions.

Pollution can poison marine life and decimate entire marine environments. Vast quantities of solid and chemical waste from human activities are continually dumped and leach into the oceans, including plastics, sewage, oil and toxins that accumulate in food webs.

Habitat destruction physically limits the suitable living space available to marine life. Coastal development, trawling, and aquaculture all destroy important marine habitats vital for supporting ocean health, such estuaries and mangrove systems that function as nurseries. Visit Save Our Seas

Play National Geographic’s Animal Jam to learn about sea creatures! Click to visit website.

Each twilight, I stand near the windows and crane my neck to see into the graying day. If I’m lucky, a few times a year I’ll catch a glimpse of this scene: a waddling, bushy bandit followed by five more, tinier lumps hop-stepping at her flanks, and a sixth furry fluff ball hurrying to rejoin the group, called a “nursery” of racoons. Or perhaps I’ll stumble upon a doe and her fawn in mid-afternoon while I tend to outdoor chores. At midnight we hear the armadillo rustling around in the leaves outside our bedroom.

At any of these occasions, I’m liable to jump up and become a dangerous (if well-intentioned and still cute) force of stealthy urgency. Midnight armadillos bring a flailing arm or jutting knee with a startling squeal of joy that cuts into Ryan’s dreams. Like a true lover, he never minds. He just smiles, rubs his sore side, and falls back to sleep just after hearing “Oh no, it’s the BABY racoons! Hear them trilling??” Mm-hmm, he mumbles, oblivious but happy to see me happy.

Any good day includes mammals. But I think of them less as organisms classified into groups, and more as revelations of the meaning of life. Tiny secular deity symbols, if you will, of the interdependent web of life. Mammals are a stampeding, scuttling segment of the world that can’t seem to find contentment with just one size or function.

To virtually travel the world and learn more about mammal species, play around with the interactive WWF WildFINDER.

The BBC’s Life of Mammals with David Attenborough is a fantastic educational romp with a great diversity of species:

“Happy Birthday: Hope it leaves you with lots of great mammaries.” -Leanin’ Tree

Mammal Trivia

Name 3 characteristics of mammals.

Which kind of North American fox can climb trees?

True or False: Humans have both hair and fur.

True or False: Marsupials are not Mammals.

How many teeth does an opossum have?

Organizations Working for Mammals

How to Help

One of the best ways to help animals is to first educate yourself and be ready to share that information with others. Did your neighbor find a spotted fawn in the grass that looks “abandoned”? If you know a lot about mammals like the white-tailed deer, then you know to tell your neighbor not to remove the fawn – it’s mother will likely return for it within a day or two, and the supposed abandonment is a part of fawn survival strategy. Learn more about mammals from UC Berkeley’s Hall of Mammals. Or challenge your kids to try the mammals quiz and other fun games.

Visit a conservation center at a state or national park near you, and listen to park interpreters teach about mammals like bears, coyotes, deer, and many more. Learning about mammals almost always involves understanding “the food chain” and the complex symbiotic relationships that make up any ecosystem – the herbivores shape the plant life, and the carnivores maintain a healthy population of herbivores. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find that wolves shape rivers:

Surely this post of all the summer naturalist series will receive the least Likes no matter what I write here. Bugs! Not very popular. But it is sometimes nice to know that fewer people will be reading this and I can therefore write whatever I want to about insects! It’s liberating, like fireflies just released from their jar held in the sweaty hands of a mystified young girl intent on capturing Tinkerbell.

My favorite fluttery, crawly things happen to be ladybugs, fireflies or lightning bugs, damselflies, pill bugs or roly polys, bumble bees, and Monarch butterflies. Of course, they’re all important. Without the two species of midges (small flies) that pollinate the cacao trees, we’d never have chocolate!

Ladybugs aren’t true bugs, but I can’t help feeling rather attached to them. Inquisitive ladybugs once fed off aphid eggs and dewdrops extended to them on my fingertips. That’s one reason to be glad for aphids on my basil plants; I was excited to find the next patch of them so I could feed the ladybugs. 40% of all insects are beetles, and ladybugs are among these. Even the word beetle is one of my favorite words to say. National Geographic has a great article on ladybugs, or check out the Ladybug Lady.

Fireflies (or lightning bugs) are the ones that make my heart soar the most. They are a spiritual annual event for me. Every evening in summer, I take hill walks around the neighborhood and stop to watch wildlife. In dark patches of forest or backyard, there are always fireflies in abundance. But it wasn’t always this way. As a child, there were hundreds of lightning bugs where I grew up. By middle school and throughout my college years, we could hardly find a handful most months of the warm season. Now, fireflies are again lighting their lamps on our street. Firefly.org has a wealth of information on fireflies and their disappearance, as well as what we can do to help them. They also have a funny list of what fireflies are sometimes called: moon bugs, blinkies, and fire devils to name a few!

Sometimes, while laying in bed at night, I’ll see what looks like a tiny blinking green UFO dart past the window. How are they doing that?! According to National Geographic, “Fireflies have dedicated light organs that are located under their abdomens. The insects take in oxygen and, inside special cells, combine it with a substance called luciferin to produce light with almost no heat. Firefly light is usually intermittent, and flashes in patterns that are unique to each species. Each blinking pattern is an optical signal that helps fireflies find potential mates. Scientists are not sure how the insects regulate this process to turn their lights on and off.”

This Hackberry Emperor butterfly (Asterocampa celtis celtis) was found dead on the ground in Fayetteville. It has many gorgeous eye spots and brown lines. They live in hackberry woods and feed on sap and decaying fruit, and are common throughout Arkansas May – October.

Insect Trivia

Name four ways that spiders can catch their prey.

How can we tell how old a chigger is?

Butterflies taste with their ______.

Which of these are true bugs: ladybugs, or stink bugs?

Which of these has two sets of wings: dragonflies, or damselflies?

Organizations Working to Protect Pollinators

Perhaps the most common reason cited for valuing “bugs” is the role they play as pollinators. According to Pollinator.org, in the U.S. pollination produces nearly $20 billion worth of products annually. Many pollinators aren’t insects at all – these include bats, birds and small mammals. But most of them (about 200,000 species) are flies, beetles, wasps, ants, butterflies, moths and bees. Organizations all over the world are protecting them in various ways to help support native ecosystems and secure the production of food plants.

Help Our Pollinators!

Maybe you’d like to plant a Bee Smart School Garden or have fun learning with PBS in their Pick the Pollinator interactive online game. Check out this 2-minute video by the USDA on more ways to help pollinators wherever you live:

Answers to Trivia Questions:

Orb weavers / Funnel weavers / Active hunters / Camouflage ambushers; by the number of scars on its back from schizeckenosy (this is the method chiggers use to poop: by bursting their gut walls and then flexing muscles to pinch off the extruded gut, healing the gut wall); feet; stink bugs; dragonflies

Near my wedding day in 2007, finding my usual place next to the water.

Regarding water, I’m quite a paradox. As a Pisces who can’t swim, I find myself being drawn towards and away from water simultaneously. Deep, murky water terrifies me more than a dark forest. Yet I love nothing more than being close to flowing, constantly cycling water such as the streams and creeks known in the Ozarks. Water moving across shiny rocks is hypnotizing, and few things are more fun than looking for life around the water’s edge – from ducks to frogs, they’re a few of of my favorite things. Even a nice-sized, natural fountain can suffice if I’m stuck in a city for the afternoon. I just find a rock big enough to sit on near the water, and immediately feel whole again no matter how many people pass by. Water is a tough thing to pin down. Our bodies are full of it, but it can be considered a resource “out there somewhere,” external to us, filling up our delightful swimming pools. It’s a source of life, but also of destruction and death. And despite these powers, aquatic habitats are the most fragile and vulnerable to pollution.

Water Trivia

Impress your friends with a few facts from the Northwest Arkansas Master Naturalist Hydrology Training! “Hydrology is the study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water on Earth and other planets, including the hydrologic cycle, water resources and environmental watershed sustainability.” –Source

(Answers Below)

True/False: The weight of all algae on Earth is greater than the weight of all terrestrial plants.

Approximately what percentage of water on our planet is salt water? And fresh water?

What percentage of fresh water is our surface freshwater?

The human brain is composed of what percentage of water? And our blood?

How many miles of rivers and streams are there in Arkansas?

Organizations Working for Water

There are many non-profit organizations working on water issues within my local area of Arkansas. These include the Beaver Watershed Alliance, the Illinois River Watershed Partnership, the Arkansas Water Resources Center, Ozarks Water Watch, and many others whose missions overlap with those protecting our water. We’re lucky to have them, because so many people worldwide not only lack water advocates but lack safe drinking water, period. Here are some national and international organizations monitoring water quality and protecting water resources:

Give a Kid a Summer!

Make a Splash: Help Protect Water

Become a Clean Water Rainger with the Illinois River Watershed Partnership! “Clean Water Raingers are kids that want to make a positive difference in their watershed. Becoming a Clean Water Rainger is fun and it’s free for kids in kindergarten through 5th grade.”

July is Lakes Appreciation Month! On July 12th, jump in for a Lake Appreciation Cleanup, 9 am to 1 pm. Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area Visitor Center, 20201 E Hwy 12 in Rogers. “Join us to pick up trash and remove bulky waste from the lake and lakeside area at Hobbs State Park. Volunteers can put boats in and paddle around the lake, as well as walk along shoreline areas at the park. Volunteers may bring their own boats for paddling around the lakeshore. Check-in begins at 9 am at the Visitor Center, and a free lunch and door-prize drawing will take place following the cleanup.” For questions, contact Rebekah Penny at 479-789-5000 or rebekah.penny@arkansas.gov Discover many more cleanups, float trips and events on the Beaver Watershed Alliance.

As a young girl, I became a traveler. I wanted to experience the world in the way some people experience their first love, and sought to explore islands with no cars, forest waterfalls, new cultures, vegetarian cuisine, other languages, and mountains that brought me closer to a simple version of God. As a woman, however, I have matured into a problem with traveling and exploring the world, much like the way children outgrow tiny playhouses and discover one day that their elementary classrooms seem inexplicably tiny after years away. A traveler can develop the habit of discovery, overturning rocks and societal expectations, rustling around in leaves and layers of place. Discovery alludes to an audience the way writing does: true, it can be a private experience just as joyful as a public ceremony transitioning us from one stage of life or state of being to another, but the discovery of something which is so tantamount to its salvation is an experience cloaked in morality. No sooner can I discover an abandoned child without telling someone than I could explore the world and encounter nature, knowing its peril, and keep it a secret.

Being a naturalist is like being Edge Habitat, a conglomeration of science, art, spirituality, philosophy, and love, never just one place but stepping into many at once.

Our summer naturalist series is composed of short blog posts spread throughout July and August, covering environmental science topics including:

Each topic will contain trivia, interesting websites, online games, relevant organizations you can get involved with, upcoming classes and events, and more. These blog posts won’t be exclusively science, though – Amanda will be sharing related artwork and sketches from her journal*, and each post will be written “creative non-fiction” style. We hope it’ll be interesting and informative summer reading, and that you’ll join us as we explore the many adventures and wonders Earth has to offer.

*Did you notice there haven’t been any sketches posted? Well, the process went a LOT farther than a few sketches…starting Fall 2014 I’ll be selling naturalist-themed greeting cards locally and online, to support the Ripples project. Follow our blog to be the first to know when these designs are available!